Republicans Promote Gore’s Movie

I was delighted this morning when I read this piece by Sebastian Mallaby at the Washington Post website. I have criticized him in the past, but here he makes a very good point about the relationship between current Republican policies and the growing interest in Al Gore’s film,Â An Inconvenient Truth:

Ordinarily this film would never have been made, let alone scheduled for release in hundreds of theaters. But President Bush and the congressional Republicans have created a Ross Perot moment: a hunger for a leader with diagrams and charts, for a nerd who lays out basic facts ignored by blinkered government. By their contempt for expert opinion on everything from Iraqi reconstruction to the cost of their tax cuts, Republicans have turned Diagram Gore into a hero.

Everyone is getting tired of the factual relativism. People are getting tired of GOP delay tactics, like calling for more research, or making ever more bizarre claims about the ulterior motives of Americans who want to protect the environment. We want our government to face reality with creativity and confidence, not dithering and doublespeak.

In other words, the ads are nonsense. So are some of the assertions on the CEI Web site. The group suggests, for example, that polar bears have nothing to fear from the melting of their habitat. But the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment , a top-notch peer-reviewed source on this subject, has something different to say: “the reduction in sea ice is very likely to have devastating consequences for polar bears.”

The piece is full of references to actual scientific resources, and is worth reading in full. The Republicans are going to have to figure out a better way to face the challenges of global climate change than pretending it isn’t real. It’s real. Evidence will only continue to accumulate.